Affordances in Robotic Tasks -- A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews how the concept of affordances from psychology is adapted for robotics, categorizing approaches based on prior knowledge assumptions to enhance autonomous interaction with objects.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification of affordance research in robotics, linking diverse approaches through a knowledge-based categorization scheme.

Findings

Classified literature based on prior knowledge levels

Identified key areas for future research

Proposed a unified framework for affordance understanding

Abstract

Affordances are key attributes of what must be perceived by an autonomous robotic agent in order to effectively interact with novel objects. Historically, the concept derives from the literature in psychology and cognitive science, where affordances are discussed in a way that makes it hard for the definition to be directly transferred to computational specifications useful for robots. This review article is focused specifically on robotics, so we discuss the related literature from this perspective. In this survey, we classify the literature and try to find common ground amongst different approaches with a view to application in robotics. We propose a categorisation based on the level of prior knowledge that is assumed to build the relationship among different affordance components that matter for a particular robotic task. We also identify areas for future improvement and discuss possible directions that are likely to be fruitful in terms of impact on robotics practice.